Case studies were presented by:
- Sales-Marketing alignment remains hard to achieve. The resulting chasm between Marketing and Sales can be seen as a "black hole" into which leads can fall.
For more, see my recent post Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring to Build Bridges
One way to bridge the gap between Sales and Marketing is to use lead nurturing (Jim called it a "lead hardening" process). This, combined with agreed-upon rules for when a lead is "qualified" and a good system for scoring leads, can help improve sales-marketing alignment.
For example, if a prospect registers on ShareBuilder's site, they kick off an automated lead nurturing campaign to help educate the prospect about their retirement programs. They then track how the prospect interacts with their emails and website to implicitly figure out where the prospect is in their buying cycle, and score the prospects accordingly.
Similarly, rather than having their business development reps (BDRs) call all marketing leads, iTKO scores leads and creates call down lists that focus their BDR's time on the top 300 leads.
Bonus tip: Measure Marketing effectiveness based on their impact on the end of the pipeline, using metrics like "marketing-driven revenue" and "cost per closed deal". This helps keep incentives aligned.
What's The Payoff?
According to ShareBuilder, implementing a lead nurturing / lead scoring process pays off in three key ways:
- More engaged prospects. By sending prospects the right info at the right time, they actually improve their prospect relationships.
- More sales faster. By developing leads before passing them to the sales team (essentially, by pre-selling leads), ShareBuilder increased their lead to close rate to 65% in the first 30 days vs. 51% prior. Also, they've "revived" many leads that were previously thought dead: 12% of new "sales" leads are now >1 year old, vs. only 3% before.
- Less costs. By
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